The news broke on 28 October 2018. Through the crackle and hiss of the radio, we made out one sentence: “Jair Bolsonaro has been elected president of Brazil.”
It was a long way from Brasília to Maçaranduba, an Indigenous community in the Amazon rainforest, but the significance of the news was clear. Some of our Awá and Tenetehar friends paced up and down, others held their heads in their hands. One let out a visceral scream, before reaching for a bottle of sugarcane spirit.
Two men arrived after dark, crossing the river in a dugout canoe, the final leg of their nine-hour journey back from delivering the community’s ballot papers. As they approached the village they absorbed the scene and knew the news they most feared had arrived. They pulled up some stools and sat down, deflated.
